Given Malta’s obsession with politics and all things political, to the extent that she has confounded many a foreign ruler throughout her history, one can hardly expect an election campaign to be without its manifold visits to different phases of the Island’s past. That this is superlatively viewed and filtered according to one’s own political leanings, however, is another guarantee.

But for a 21st century campaign such as the one we are living at this moment in time to be played, almost fully, in the past tense, as seems to be the inexplicable scare tactic on the part of the incumbent at Castille, is tantamount to giving up and simply hoping for the best. During an election campaign, political parties are rightly expected to come up with ideas, to present plans, to offer sensible timetables and to give assurances rather than creep back into their well-worn shells and, in so doing, adopt the lotus position inside it, for all that’s worth.

But even in dealing strictly with the past, as the Nationalists would have us do for fear of otherwise raking the current crude surface of their political patch of land, it seems there have to be restrictions, border lines and checkpoint charlies lest one absent-mindedly lands a cheerless foot in a forgotten minefield. History, however, is a continuation of events and not a selected series of chapters that one freely brings up, loosely or intact, to satisfy the needs of solitary incursions onto the field of imaginary battle or to win some forlorn media argument.

Quite by coincidence, when contemplating the current Nationalist tactic of dragging a present-day election campaign in the past tense, as if one can offer change and alternatives by just looking up ghosts on the agenda, I happened to be reading Francis Galea’s Juan Mamo: Hajtu u Hilietu, a remarkable book about a remarkable man whose social, cultural and political foresight had only one possible better, his mentor Manwel Dimech.

But is this not digging up the past? It certainly is. However, Galea’s book indeed opened my eyes to one obvious conclusion as to why the Nationalists seem to prefer to go back only to the recent Eighties. The rest, assumingly, is to be forgotten and relegated to the more obscure pages of modern Maltese history. Who cares if social benefits such as free hospitalisation and health services and free university came about under Labour in the Seventies, and why should anyone worry about the sheer parody of democracy that was perpetrated in the Sixties under a corrupt, inefficient Nationalist government?

All that is what many of my post-World War II generation has experienced as we grew up trying to fathom the political whirlwinds that also produced mass emigration, mass unemployment, crass corruption and horrendously undemocratic practices. Though it was certainly a lot to have to contend with, our predecessors had it a lot worse, alas.

In Galea’s highly researched and documented book, one is shocked by how much everything and everyone in power at the time of Juan Mamo connived to keep – in whichever vicious way possible, including the so-called Language Question – the majority, the working classes, entrapped in the misery of ignorance, poverty and ill-health.

But in the light of the current election campaign, the thing that strikes you most in this sprightly account is the way the Nationalists, then already tinkering with fascism’s trends from across the water, seem to have since retained the same box of tricks. Juan Mamo, like Dimech, was a chief victim of these tricks, most of which are based on the idea of undermining the individual, character assassination and the use of spin when this very word was still a twinkle in the eye of some media guru’s great-grandfather.

That same horrific machine has been put to good and effective use against every emerging Labour leader since the early Twenties. When the war’s outcome had put the Nationalists temporarily in a tight corner, the working majority of these Islands had slowly but surely crawled out of the darkness, finally aware of their rights and their aspirations and determinedly looking forward to progress and change.

The past will always be the past, but if we really do have to discuss it, we need to do so on the understanding that every chapter, every action and every event is analysed and, even better, compared to contemporary situations elsewhere in the world, not necessarily restricted to the old British Empire. History is certainly not an election tool, though it is often temptingly used as such, and should be confined to the

lecture-room and given as fodder in the much-vaunted tribulations of academics who, one hopes, will still retain a sense of justice and fairness, not always easily detected in some Maltese history books, old and new.

Writers like Francis Galea help us know the past, but they also point to the future. Historians, with their interpretations, often tend to stick to it. By knowing the past, one is bound to find one’s way into the future, not as an election exercise, but more as a fact-finding mission into the embittered soul of this politicised nation.

If this election campaign is going to make any sense at all, let’s have it run on a realistic level playing-field. The past tense may offer some brief respite, but at this moment in time it is the future that beckons each and every one of us. And we all know who is addressing it the way it should, that is with ideas, plans, timetables and the appropriate management assurances.